Between Obasanjo and Babangida

Before the open letters by Nigeria’s former leaders, Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, it had become public knowledge that the Nigerian project was malfunctioning. Perhaps, the interest their letters generated is on account of the weight they added to raging feelings of distrust, despair and frustration.

That was not the first time the two spoke out in times of great national apprehension and distress. In the hey days of the Boko Haram insurgency when that terror group bombed churches resulting in the killing of thousands of innocent worshippers, they had issued a joint statement in which they deprecated the situation and called attention to the slide in our national affairs and the urgency to halt it.

They had said even those they regarded as patriots were fast losing faith in the basis for the unity and continued existence of the country. As it turned out, Boko Haram was soon to change tactics. It began to attack mosques and Muslim places of worship. Soon, their activities were degraded with its murderous onslaughts confined to the northeast.

It became easy for some to argue that since the terror group kills both Christians and Muslims, it cannot be accused of harbouring a religious agenda against Christians even when the group has never hidden is theocratic mission. The successful outcome of the 2015 elections appeared to have restored some hope that the worst had been averted especially given the threats, tension and bitter altercation it generated.

But, it was a matter of time for the same malfeasance to rear its ugly head again. This time, we are confronted by the same pass through acts of omission and commission by the incumbent president. Not only has the economy refused to improve, the country is more divided and fragmented along ethnic, religious and other primordial lines than ever before in its history. The life of the Nigerian is worth nothing any more as we have virtually been reduced to a killing field. And in the face of these killings, government’s response has at best remained suspect.

When the two former leaders came up with their observations as to the direction of the ship of this country, they were only confirming, adding further weight and impetus to prevailing views in the country. Though there was initial controversy over the authenticity of the first letter released by Babangida’s Media Adviser Kassim Afegbua, events have since shown that the views expressed in that letter were actually authorized by his boss.

Curiously however, the police authorities in their indecent haste were quick to accept the rebuttal by those who apparently felt uncomfortable with the contents of the first one. And in that haste to fault the first letter, they wasted no time in declaring Afegbua a wanted man even without a prior invitation. Ironically, the same police made no effort to get clarifications from Babangida but quickly presumed the rebuttal was the right one to accept. Whatever led them to that position remains largely cloudy.

As events turned out, they were wrong in their presumptions as Babangida in an interview with a national daily, stood by all the contents of the release by Afegbua. The conduct of the police was not entirely surprising. It portrayed it jittery of the contents of the letter especially coming soon after the damning assessment by Obasanjo. For that, everything had to be done to discredit the one that is critical of the government.

But that only exposed the bias of the police on the matter. It showed how overprotective of the government that institution is. There is virtually nothing in that letter that is not in the vortex of public opinion. There is not much in it that is a sharp departure from the views earlier expressed by Obasanjo. If there were gaps in their letters, the Catholic Bishops filled them in their presentations to Buhari during their visit also last week. The only point the police had was the purported rebuttal which it made no effort to establish the authenticity. In matters of such nature, the police ought to have got to the root of the matter before taking position.

There was no emergency thrown up by the letter to warrant them reacting the way they did. But that is not the only instance in recent times the police reacted to issues of public interest in a manner that does not depict it as an unbiased institution. The running battle between it and the Benue State government is another ponderous case. Even after the Inspector General of Police IG, Ibrahim Idris had apologized to the people of Benue for his careless remark tagging the killings a result of communal clashes, the state governor, Samuel Ortom has again accused him of bias in handling the continued killings in that state.

Ortom raised an issue the police must address. He alleged that the police usually arrest livestock guards employed by his government to monitor the implementation of the anti-open grazing law, display sophisticated guns purportedly recovered from them and label them armed ‘Benue militia’ in order to sabotage that law. He then contends, if the so-called Benue militia were that armed, how come Fulani herdsmen serially overpowered them slaughtering their people in their homes without resistance?

That is the big question and until the police offer cogent response to this, it is difficult not to share in the position of the governor. Again, why is it so easy to arrest the so-called Benue militia with sophisticated guns and not the murderous Fulani herdsmen that regularly slaughter children, women and the aged with an air of invincibility? The most sensible thing expected of the police is to arrest those behind the killings in Benue. Parading the so-called Benue militia is no solution to the killings unless we are being made to believe they are responsible for murdering their own people.

When Ortom therefore accused the police of seeking to change the narrative of the Benue killings, he is on serious point. It was not surprising that this bias has manifested in the indecorous language deployed by force spokesman in labelling the governor a drowning man. He was right in a way irrespective of the strong exceptions taken by the House of Representatives on his ranting. After all, is Ortom not drowning in the pool of the blood of innocent and helpless people of his state regularly butchered by herdsmen without any help from the same police authorities?

Beyond these and the dismal rating of Buhari, the two letters struck a common chord on the imperative for generational shift in leadership. They want leadership to be in the hands of a new set of knowledgeable, well-educated and visionary people in tune with the wider dynamics of the 21st century. Obasanjo wants that through his Coalition for Nigerian Movement. Babangida still has confidence in the two-party system. They want new approaches; new paradigms. You cannot toe the same old path and expect anything different. They are right.

My reading of their positions is not that they want young people just because of their age alone. They want energetic young people of knowledge, experience and skills. They are rooting for very exceptional and knowledgeable people and not the recycled leadership that has failed to serve our collective needs. They are looking for what Plato aptly tagged ‘philosopher kings’.

But they failed to lead us into how such leadership will emerge given the very complicated power equation in this country. They ought to have gone further to factor the role of ethnicity and primordial proclivities in the emergence of such leaders. These are the irreducible decimals that shape and direct the pattern of political recruitment. Babangida came close to it when he talked of systemic and structural re-engineering. State police and ranching for herdsmen as canvassed by Osinbajo are only an infinitesimal symptom of the larger systemic dissonance. The resolution of all these dysfunctions should presage generational shift in leadership for it to endure.